


Baltimore, 1925

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Series: Epistolary [6]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Cuddling, Established Relationship, Fluff, Forgiveness, Kissing, M/M, Meeting the Family, Oral, Rimming, Tension, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 23:15:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7127351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Your accent,” Anthony reiterates, “and your rudeness. God give me strength in surviving this country, and Mr. Brown, give me back my cigarette. It was hard-won already without you being a bloody nuisance.”</i>
</p><p>Our lovely gentlemen travel the sea to America, for Anthony to meet Matthew's parents, and complain endlessly about the condition of the colonies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Matt wonders how a trip can feel endless and at once so strangely short. He can’t remember the last time he felt solid ground beneath his feet, and he can’t remember the last time he was so happy to spend time in a tiny cabin curled up against his grumbling, grumpy poet.

Anthony has not taken to the sea well.

He also hasn’t taken to it badly - he’s merely showed his endless displeasure with it as the boat chugged along from England to the “colonies”.

“We should make port this afternoon,” Matt mumbles, stretching on the cot as Anthony wriggles next to him to pull free and stand. “Then we can find a place to stay and clean up and rest before I subject you to my family.”

“Keep saying it like that,” Anthony chides him, quick with a hand against the wall as the boat wavers. “You’re only making me more enthused by the moment.”

Matt snorts, grinning, as Anthony - in only his underthings - fumbles in his tailcoat for his cigarettes. It was pitched to the floor the night before when they stripped each other bare, the swaying of the ship finally counterbalanced by copious amounts of champagne shared on the deck. The cost of traveling in first-class rather than second - or God help them, steerage - had lead to a row between them before they boarded. Matthew insisted, stubborn boy, that it was unnecessary to pay so much, and Anthony, equally pig-headed, wouldn’t hear it.

He also wouldn’t be caught dead in any class less, knowing damn well that he would possibly wind up actually dead for it.

Anthony swears a florid string of relief as he finds his packet of cigarettes, closing his eyes rather than focusing on his lighter so near. When he speaks again, smoke spools into his words. “It’s telling, Mr. Brown, that in all my years of drunken careening, I have never once so much as now envied what it feels like not to be nauseous.”

“Get back into bed, then,” Matthew tells him, snorting in amusement. “That way the boat takes you with it when it pitches.” He ignores the grumbling that comes his way, something about how he will set the bloody bed on fire if he tries. Matt resists reminding Anthony that he has never, not once, set the bed on fire at home, regardless of how drunk or hungover he was at the time.

He shifts, instead, to rest on his side, elbow coming up to support him as he watches his partner grasp the wall and set his feet wide.

“D’you know what?” He says after a moment, waiting for Anthony to hum his displeasure at the chewing of words Matt does when he lets his accent go. “I think I love you rather a lot.”

Another hum of deeper displeasure, though this time entirely and transparently false. “How convenient for you to have me trapped on an ocean liner in the middle of the Atlantic when you tell me.”

“I’ve told you before plenty,” Matthew grins. “Convenient!”

“Yes,” drawls Anthony, squinting at the beautiful young man, entirely bare in his bed before finally - unsteadily - coming closer to him. “I’m afraid I’ve no escape now, and must love you in return. How dreadful.”

“A right Sisyphus,” Matthew comments, rolling onto his back as Anthony sets a hand against the wall over the bed and leans over him. He reaches for his cigarette and sets it to his own lips in turn. “Trapped with me forever.”

“You do weigh a bloody ton when I have to carry you to bed,” Anthony comments, holding out his fingers, expectantly, for the cigarette to be returned. Matt snorts and turns his head aside as he exhales. 

“So do you, Professor Dimmond, so do you.”

“Nonsense, I’m svelte as a schoolgirl.”

“Maybe a dozen of them.”

“You know your accent’s worsening,” Anthony points out, lowering himself back to the bed and atop his student. He straddles his hips and sits against his groin, stretching one arm out feline to take back his cigarette. Matthew drags from it and removes it from his lips, and just as languidly stretches his arm above his head, and out of his poet’s reach.

“We’re well past halfway there,” he points out. “You’re the one with the funny accent now.”

“Your accent,” Anthony reiterates, “and your rudeness. God give me strength in surviving this country, and Mr. Brown, give me back my cigarette. It was hard-won already without you being a bloody nuisance.”

Matt arches up with a grin and relinquishes the cigarette only when Anthony bends to take it, close enough that Matthew can kiss against his throat. In truth, he himself is nervous. The closer they get to America, the more he thinks of every little detail in his life that so differs from Anthony’s. His house, his neighbourhood, his family… how the streets are dirtier and more crooked, how kids run wild after feral pups…

“We should take a bath once your head’s settled,” Matthew tells him, stroking his hand through sweat-lank hair and tugging it. “A messy one and then a proper one,” he elaborates, grinning bright. “While we’ve the time.”

Anthony sprawls his body long atop Matthew, so long that his feet hang off the end of the bed they share. He rests his cheek against Matthew’s shoulder and drags from the opposite corner of his lips, exhaling slowly as Matt wraps an arm around him.

“You know I’ve often written of you as sent to me by the gods,” Anthony muses. “But I think I’ve missed a subtle detail.”

Matt makes a curious sound, smile already widening.

“That I’m willing to trek through torment simply to be near you. Ships and a country that destroys its alcohol rather than drinking it, in a place where we’ll be lucky to be able to so much as look at each other, let alone do all the illicit things I prefer.”

“I think Dante’s beat you to that poem.”

“Just so, Beatrice,” Anthony agrees, lifting his head to meet Matthew’s warm, velvet brown eyes. “I must love you terribly.”

“Good,” Matt decides. And they speak no more of it.

As the cigarette burns down, shared between the two of them, they alternately doze and adjust their positions to be more comfortably close against the other. Hours yet ‘til they reach port, and then as Anthony had said. No alcohol. Strict laws against sodomy. A place as far removed from Cambridge - or their friends’ home in Oxford - as it can possibly be.

They decide that as Matt has his sea legs much quicker than Anthony after a bender, he will be the one to dress and find them something to eat, as Anthony sets up the tub in which they will enjoy their late breakfast. 

As Matthew goes, he allows himself to take in the ship for the last time. She is lovely, well-appointed and overly decorated. He had not been within the first-class quarters or cabins when he came to England; steerage had been just fine for Matthew Brown. Now, he lets himself remember all the filigree and intricately decorated glass. The wallpaper that fades from corridor to corridor. The carpet, thick and lush beneath his feet. This is Anthony’s world, it always has been; this is a world Matt had been allowed to glimpse, where a hand was extended for him to take. He had taken it, but it will always, to some degree, remain foreign to him.

He finds for them some bread rolls and champagne-baked ham, cheeses of three types and colors, some tiny tomatoes and a few slices of cucumber on the side. He explains to one of the waitstaff that his friend is unwell and that he had promised to bring him a small meal as his stomach settles. He refuses a doctor and leaves the dining room with a winning smile and a few sweetmeats added on top of his carefully-filled plate.

How in the devil Anthony has managed to have a bottle of wine in hand at this hour, without leaving the room, defies him.

But there he is, his debauched poet, making the most of his remaining hours at sea. He is sprawled nude in the bath, glimpses of skin seen through soap bubbles when the water in the tub tilts with the motion of the liner that Matthew no longer feels. Beside the bath is another bottle and an opener, and safely out of the way of the water, but within arm’s reach, are Anthony’s cigarettes and his lighter.

He watches Matthew narrowly, knees and nose just above the bubbles, his greying hair curling wet against his brow. His arms drape over the side of the bath, cigarette smoldering on one side, wine on the other. Though his mouth is unseen, his smile is in his eyes, and with the the hand that holds his cigarette, he beckons Matthew closer.

Matt grins, he can’t help it, and wishes for a moment that he had had the forethought to strip himself bare as soon as he walked into their room again. He walks confidently, now, though he takes small steps, until he reaches the side of the tub, and then he sinks to his knees, holding the plate out on both palms as a slave might.

“I’ve always wanted to be a cabin boy,” he admits in a whisper. “My entire time on board taking care of my wayward captain.” He grins and tilts his head, just to see through the film of bubbles on the water. “Lovely view.”

Anthony’s eyes narrow even more, and finally he emerges, languid as a siren from beneath the foamy water. Matthew balances the tray precariously on one hand, taking from Anthony his bottle so that he can splash the suds from his face. His poet turns to him, on his side, and drapes over the edge of the tub. Matt sets his bottle down to better hold the tray, kneeling with an athlete’s stamina and balance, utterly striking in his youth and strength. Anthony leans further out to kiss him, a simple touch that sweeps to one much deeper.

“Hardly the loveliest,” Anthony murmurs against his mouth, smiling into another kiss before leaning back enough to take up one of the little tomatoes, and feed it to his stalwart cabin boy. “We should endeavor, I think, to leave as many sins in the Atlantic as we might before we reach your puritanical colony. Exorcise our demons by exercising our other parts, such as it were.”

“You’re terrible,” Matthew tells him, careful to chew and swallow before speaking again. “And your poetry is slipping, if that’s the best you can come up with.”

“Bite your tongue, awful boy,” Anthony chastens him, and in reply Matt holds his tongue between his teeth with a grin before accepting another morsel fed to him. “Shall I be more vulgar?”

“I love it when you pour your filthy words against my skin, you know that,” Matt replies, taking up a piece of ham and folding it against a cucumber before feeding that, in turn, to his poet.

Anthony’s lips brush his fingertips, a mischievous look in his eyes as he chews and considers his words. It doesn’t help, particularly, that he’s staving off a hangover and on a bloody boat that won’t stop tilting. But the sight of Matthew before him - especially Matthew kneeling before him - has always been an inspiration.

“I will tell you then that the curl of the waves beneath us is not unfamiliar to me. I have known it, in pulses of heat that immolate in their consummation and in the upheaval and collapse that rends well-formed fissures beneath the surface of your skin. Your muscles - unseen and seen, but all known - undulate as if your body were the sea incarnate, destroyer and creator that as soon sunders me as gives me life. But your rhythms are not dictated by the moon, patient and steady. You are akin instead to the world primordial, newly-formed and powerful, that will be host to infinite histories writ with tongue and hands, and in which will be sown the seeds of countless civilizations left to burn bright and cool.”

Anthony ends his makeshift poem with a drag from his cigarette, and he takes up a bun from the tray to bring with him back into the tub.

Matthew curses softly and settles back on his heels, watching Anthony tug the bread loose with his teeth. He is so incredibly lovely, eyes hooded and expression clear of all but pure innocence. Matthew loves him so much his heart aches.

“A soliloquy gone straight to my groin, maestro,” Matt replies, taking up some meat to set against his tongue, sucking his finger clean after as he watches his poet.

Anthony’s smile twitches wide before he can stop himself, as helpless to flattery as Matthew is to his shoehorned, wheat-pasted words. He meant them, of course, though they could use a rewrite or seventy. But his student never asks for that, instead accepting the words just as they come, as if he thinks himself lucky to hear them that way.

Silly boy.

Beautiful boy.

“Better now than had you asked me earlier this morning,” Anthony snorts, before taking another bite. “Then you’d have received a limerick equating the roiling of our loins to the roiling of the sea, and how nauseous it all made me.”

Matthew licks his lips apart and bends to nuzzle wet hair from Anthony’s temple, whispering in his ear.

“You’re a right shit, sir.”

“Get in the tub, Mr. Brown.”

How can Matt say no to that?

He sets the plate carefully aside, near the cigarettes and lighter, and stands to slip free his shirt, and step from his shoes. He deliberately turns profile to remove his pants, bending at the waist only and straightening with a seemingly indifferent sigh as his cock stands half-erect already.

He gives Anthony a look and motions for him to draw up his knees before he steps into the tub, wincing at the heat of the water. Then he kneels, and then he bends, meeting Anthony’s lips with his own, tasting the sweet bun on his tongue.

“Now what?”

“You’re the cabin boy,” Anthony murmurs, amused. “Shouldn’t you know?”

“You’re the commander,” Matthew responds, brows raised. “Shouldn’t _you_?”

Anthony laughs, stubbing out his cigarette against the side of the bath and dropping it uncaring to the floor. They’re hours away, only, from being out of this room and on staunch Christian land again, and what does he care if he makes a mess? The bun at least, half-eaten, makes its way back to the tray with a clatter, and Anthony grasps Matt with both hands against his cheeks to pull their bodies flush together and tangle him into a kiss.

That he may go hours, days, let alone bloody weeks without this is unconscionable. That he will at the same time suffer the misery of not having booze at his ready disposal to ease his woes is even worse. Matthew might make fun of Anthony’s poorly-formed poetry, but Anthony meant every word - the jesting and the sincere. He will have Matthew as many times as he can manage - or be had by him, it hardly matters.

“I love you,” Anthony tells him suddenly, those words as important to speak now in his sudden rash fear as the desire to enjoy their particular pleasures. “I love you entirely.”

Matt nuzzles him and settles deeper against his poet, sloshing a little over the water over the edge as he does. He loves him, he knows he is loved, and he is terrified, though he will never show it. They both are; Matt can feel it in Anthony’s form, in his carriage and the biting edge of his humor. He is scared, as Matt is, of doing something wrong, of being found out, of losing each other, in whatever way that means for them both.

“Terrible man, look what you do to me.”

“What in particular? I could describe a great many things.”

“Your cabin boy has been distracted from tending to his master,” Matt replies with a huff, lifting his chin and smiling. “I haven’t fed you a full breakfast yet, and you’re already in the wine. What will I do with you?”

Anthony considers the question, and the myriad - mostly dreadful - answers that he could give his student. Slipping further into the bath beneath him, until the water is just beneath his chin, Anthony watches the beautiful young man who somehow, in the strangest possible way, has found and claimed him. Anthony considers for a moment paying visit to the librarian that stocked his poetry, and expressing without detail his thanks.

How unlikely they are a pair. How unlikely their meeting, were it not for the devotion of this boy who now squints at him with surreptitious intent behind his words. Of all the grand romances that Anthony built and imagined for himself, Matthew has far exceeded anything of which Anthony may have dreamed.

This silly, beautiful, wonderful young man from America, who loves Anthony more than Anthony has ever loved himself.

“Don’t let your master distract you then,” Anthony tells him, stroking a slip of hair behind Matthew’s ear, smiling wide when his student laughs wry at this. “It isn’t me that’s in your service. It’s you that’s in mine, and I am in your capable hands. Feed me. Wine me. Fuck me. I am in fact at your command.”

“So much power in such incapable hands,” Matt muses, sighing as he rocks back and down, rubbing against Anthony beneath him with deliberate and practiced movements. “What does one do when faced with impatience?”

“Impatience or indecision?”

“Doesn’t one fuel the other?”

“Often,” Anthony agrees, pressing his lips together as water slips up against them. He groans as Matthew continues the slow rubbing of his hips down against Anthony’s own, but leans over him to reach for their breakfast again. He snags a pastry, and sits back to bring it to his own lips instead of Anthony’s, smugly eating it in front of him.

“Should’ve known better than to trust a cabin boy to behave himself,” Anthony snorts, but not without a smile creasing the corners of his eyes. He avails himself of his student’s other services, then, if he is not to be fed. Skimming his fingers down the boy’s back, dipping fingertips into the dimples at the base of his spine, Anthony follows the graceful slope that rises to the plush, round curve of Matthew’s bottom.

He cups his hands against those muscles, sighing against Matthew’s jaw as the flex taut. Anthony has always known himself to be wretchedly neoclassical in his aesthetic drive, but no more so than here. There is forever for him - when he was young, and now when he is not - an intoxication that blossoms dizzying from the wiles of athletic, youthful male bodies. That newly-minted masculinity, muscles carved rigid as if from marble, and strength that has only recently recognized itself plucks the poetry from Anthony’s soul like little else.

He wants to conquer it.

He wants to be conquered by it.

And Matthew, clenching now again beneath Anthony’s hands as he drives his stiffening cock against Anthony’s stomach, is the pinnacle refinement of such beauty.

As Matthew hums, chewing - terrible, brash, perfect boy - Anthony kisses his throat, and the shifting ridge of his jaw. He spreads his hands across his ass and squeezes, kneading, and spreading him wide. One hand slips inward to the crevice between, and watching Matthew above him, Anthony strokes the pad of his forefinger against Matthew’s opening.

His lovely eyes close and he sucks in a slow breath to release in a low hum on the exhale. Matt offers the rest of the pastry to Anthony and smiles when he takes it. His own hands seek over elegant shoulders and protruding collarbones, he touches against the pulse he can see at Anthony's throat.

He ruts back against the hand between his legs. 

“Beautiful,” Matthew declares, slipping his hands through Anthony's hair and tugging it. “Demanding and lovely and insatiable.”

“And?”

Matthew rolls his eyes and laughs, nuzzling beside his poet’s nose and kissing him between words, each press of lips timed to the steady circling of Anthony’s finger. “Brilliant. Talented. Prideful.”

“I was hoping for ‘mine’,” Anthony muses, tracing his nose back in return. “But I’ll take those, too, even if only the last is true.”

He relents in his teasing and wraps his hands against Matthew’s deliciously firm thighs. He brings them higher up his body with a steady tug, until his student sits astride him. Anthony rocks against him, a wavelike movement that presses his cock against the hollow where Matthew’s thigh meets his groin.

The water sloshes around them and neither care. These are their last few hours where they are free from judgement and obligation, their last few hours before inevitable anxiety will grip them both for a time, for their own reasons. 

“Mine,” Matt purrs, tilting Anthony's chin up to kiss him again as he relaxes his muscles and sinks back, just rubbing and teasing for now, deliberate and coy. “Claimed and wanted. You, I shall never let go.”

“Will you tame me?”

“You keep what you tame,” Matt points out softly, kissing him again. “It tames you in return.”

“And you tell me you’re not a poet,” Anthony scolds him fondly.

Matthew speaks the truth, though, and Anthony confesses his acceptance of it in the sweeping tangle of their kiss. They have tempered each other - Anthony, notably, from his wild ways - and stoked each other to heights the likes of which Matthew could not have imagined and Anthony thought he would never know again.

Anthony ruts harder against Matthew, nipping his bottom lip in retribution when Matthew tries to ease away from him. Finally he catches his lip, and grinning until a laugh forces Anthony to let him free, Anthony curses softly in French and fists Matthew’s hair at the back of his neck to keep him close. Matthew’s French is still poor, but he catches enough of the rough words purred against his mouth - and can feel his poet’s cock nudging needy at his backside - well enough to know his demands.

He hushes him and remains still, eyes hooding and lips parting as Anthony eases against him, just the head at first, a gentle prod for entry. Matt is still open from the night before, is certain if he slips his fingers between Anthony's legs he would find him much the same. With a soft gasp, and mumbled sweet nothings, Matthew allows himself to be gently taken again.

They keep the pace slow, to keep most of the foamy water in the tub. Matt slips his arms around Anthony's neck and clings to him as the other draws worshipful fingers up and down his back.

They will find ways, Matt is sure. Even if just rutting together, even if just holding near and sleeping sharing the same bed, they will find ways.

Matt moans softly and kisses against Anthony's ear, tugging the lobe with a laugh after.

Anthony pours out with every breath all the filthy poetry that Matt begged of him before, slipping between French and English, declarations of his love and lust, his affection and ardor, all in equal measure. They will leave their sins in the Atlantic, but Anthony does not doubt they will find their way ashore again. He will trust that Matthew, who survived this place so long, knows where they will be safe.

It is a foolish consideration to even imagine that they would go so long without this.

As Anthony thrusts up gently to fill and ease from his student, he laughs against Matthew’s shoulder and wraps his arms around him. The ceaseless shuddering of the ship beneath them seems to have stopped, now that they are making waves of their own. The movement of the sea holds little power beside the ebb and flow of Matthew’s body atop his own.

They make love and remind each other that this is theirs to have forever, regardless of country or laws or reason. They press together parted lips and swallow the other’s sounds and moan, sweet and soft, as their bodies tense nearer and nearer to release. When Anthony slips his hand between Matthew’s legs to stroke him, the younger man shudders and throws his head back with a laugh.

Anything he knows of poetry he has learned from Anthony Dimmond. Anything he knows of love, much the same. They have already, together, overcome so much that surely a city cannot destroy that. Surely just a visit cannot leave permanent scars.

Matt bends forward again and holds his lips hot against Anthony’s as he squeezes around him and feels his own release pulse free into the soapy water. He whispers that he loves him, grins when Anthony mumbles something in a foreign language he is sure means the same, and kisses him again.

He holds Anthony fast in their kiss even as his poet tries to draw away. Matthew kisses him through his climax, his poet’s breath a quickened gust against his cheek, lengthening to a low moan and a jerk of hips. Trembling fingers come to rest on Matt’s cheeks. Anthony cups his jaw and holds him close. The pulsing of his release jolts waves against the side of the tub, and as he eases, Matthew rests a hand against Anthony’s fluttering heart to sooth him to peace there too.

When they finally part, both can breathe again, and Anthony wrangles his student down to lay atop him, kissing his brow, stroking his hair. They will survive this. They may even enjoy it. Anthony makes an unspoken promise that he will - he truly will, at least in Baltimore - be on the best behavior he can manage.

Tamed, indeed.

And after both have settled, nearly sleeping in their comfort, Anthony is finally the one to stir them with a widening smile that Matthew can sense before he sees it, opening his eyes in turn.

“One down,” Anthony notes. Matt makes a curious sound, squinting in amusement. “‘Feed me, wine me, fuck me.’ I’m waiting for my drink and food, cabin boy.”

“I haven’t fucked you yet,” Matt tells him warmly.

“Then let us hope there is yet time before we dock.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _They’ve made it here. They are together, even apart. And these few quiet moments will help when after days of separation, the ugly fear that resides in Anthony will rise and whisper that he’s been left again. That he is alone. That he was a fool to think it would not end this way. And there will not be enough alcohol to quiet it, but he will remind himself of Matthew’s steadfast heartbeat and trust that he will feel it again._
> 
> _And so calmed, Anthony kisses him again, and gives him a gentle push._
> 
> _“Away with you then,” he smiles. “You’re cutting into my moping time.”_

They disembark at a quarter after two, Matt carrying their bags and grinning ear to ear as he sees his city again. He cannot deny that he has fallen in love with every aspect of England he has experienced, but he cannot, too, deny that he has missed home. The air smells different here than at Cambridge, it smells familiar, of oil and wet ropes and sweat, of difficult lives and the satisfaction of coming home.

Matt hopes that even a little, even in some inexplicable way, Anthony can catch his enthusiasm for this place.

“Shall I find us a taxi?”

“Oh?” Anthony cocks a brow. “Not the bus?”

His student snorts and mirrors his expression. “Though a hobby of mine is to torment you regularly, I would prefer we do it for mutual enjoyment. A taxi, if you’re so inclined, or we could walk.”

Anthony considers this, brows lifted. “I do so enjoy the docks,” he begins, but in a rare moment of restraint, reconsiders the rest of his inevitably torrid statement. “I shan’t make you carry the bags for so long. Good Lord, I forgot the cars go the other way here. Surely I’ll be smashed within a day.”

Matt laughs and follows him, aware that to all appearances he is but the porter to the Englishman whose relative finery - once they are separated from the others who rode the liner with them - draws curious looks from the laborers on the dock. It is as much his carriage as his clothing, cigarette balanced between his fingers, and a bend in his wrist that Anthony notes at the same times Matthew does. He straightens it. The class and name that protect him in England and allow for such comfortable flamboyance are not amongst their belongings here, but remained abroad.

He allows Matthew to flag a car for them, as Anthony waits beside their things - several bags and a shared trunk, the least that Anthony could manage without Matthew risking another fit from him.

Matthew seems to immediately slip into the skin he had left a few terms ago. He whistles, hollers, gets a car by any means necessary, and turns to Anthony with a grin to show him that they’re good to go. The driver leans out and asks Matt where they’re going, and he dictates the name of a respectable hotel he’s sure they will be comfortable in. Then, he goes back to help Anthony with the bags.

The ride is uneventful, though Anthony makes it through two more cigarettes and keeps his eyes mostly closed as they’re driven. Matthew leans out the window and regards the city. It seems like nothing has changed since he had gone away; the same high-rises, the same noise and crowds.

His excitement builds, he can’t help it, as they pass his neighbourhood and keep driving on.

Later. They will find their way back there later, once they’ve rested and recovered and changed their clothes.

“You’re staying with your parents for a time,” Anthony asks, not altogether displeased by the idea of being kept at a posh hotel like some dirty little secret, far from the wholesome, hard-working Browns who will - he’s certain - not know what to make of him.

“For a while,” agrees Matt. “Unless-”

Anthony lifts a finger, quieting Matthew’s sweet deference. They spoke about this - they had a row about it - and Matthew finally yielded. He wants both, to spend time with Anthony and time with his family. It was Anthony, in a rare moment of reason, who reminded Matthew that he sees far too much of his poet already, and has not enjoyed his family’s company in years.

When Anthony lowers his hand again, Matthew’s fingertips brush against them on the seat between.

The hotel is hardly the Savoy, but Anthony allows a sound of approval when he sees it. Polished floors and velvet drapes, not an enormous, sprawling thing but suited to perhaps a hundred guests or less. Private. Luxurious. He shares a quick smile with Matthew in thanks, before he checks in.

Matthew thanks the driver and sends him on his way. He will get a taxi home, yes, but later. He helps Anthony with his bags, remains entirely inconspicuous as he follows him to the elevators to take them up. When the doors close, he steps near and just rests his forehead against Anthony’s shoulder.

“If I go and see them this evening, I won’t be back to spend the night here,” Matt reminds him quietly.

Anthony hums, considering, but he will not make Matthew’s decisions for him on this. Though the taint of Anthony’s upbringing has been purged from the poison that filled him before, he knows that he carries scars from its years of toxification and his attempts to treat himself. He knows that this influences him unduly towards the happy company that others keep with their blood relatives, and that his immediate desire to tell Matthew to stay is not a fair one.

He shall write a letter of defeat to Hannibal, while Matthew is away, allowing that perhaps after so many decades, Anthony has started to grow up after all.

His fingers stretch, brushing against Matthew’s palm just before the elevator stops.

“They will wonder,” Anthony says, “why you didn’t come straightaway.”

Matt snorts but nods. He knows. He knows because he told them when they were due in, and he told them that he would come immediately after helping his companion settle in his rooms. He had, amusingly, brought about the excuse that Professor Dimmond would feel disoriented coming into a country where everything is a little bit backward.

He should go.

He will, he knows, once he brings their bags up and takes only what he needs for a night or two.

“You’re going to mope to Hannibal, aren’t you,” Matt says, pushing from his poet and grinning as he takes their bags again as he makes to leave.

Anthony stands for a moment more, so stunned that the elevator nearly closes on him before he finally escapes it. He follows quickly down the hall behind him, then briskly steps in front of him, all but pinned between his student and the door. Anthony produces a key, and squints at Matt across his shoulder, before unlocking the room and sauntering in.

“I knew it,” Matthew says, and Anthony feigns shock as he turns.

“You insult me by treating me as if I’m so transparent.”

“‘Dear Hannibal, I was nearly run over within two strides of entering Baltimore, which is an outright lie but I’m going to tell it anyway.’”

“‘Dear Hannibal, send help posthaste. I am trapped in the colonies with a dreadful bullying boy who thinks himself cleverer than I, an utter impossibility.’”

Matt laughs and closes the door behind them both, leaning against it for a moment before dropping the bags and turning the lock and walking towards his poet.

“‘Dear Hannibal, he’s gone for the night and I don’t know what to do with myself until I see him. I love him terribly and refuse to admit it -’”

“I’ve admitted it plenty,” Anthony counters, but he doesn’t let go of Matt, where his arms have settled to the younger man’s hips.

“‘- and I shall be on my best behavior when I meet his family on the morrow. Postscript: The prohibition is an utterly ridiculous concept. I’m glad I have a bottle left from the boat to enjoy yet.’”

“Incorrect again,” Anthony murmurs fondly, leaning down to kiss him. “I have two.”

Matthew laughs against his mouth before the sound catches between them, held in the warmth of their kiss, a simple thing, tender and lingering. His poet frames his narrow hips with his hands. He spans them upward to the swell of his ribs, and finally brings them to Matthew’s chest. A twitch presses his fingers firmly, and as their lips unfurl from the other, Anthony presses his brow to Matthew’s own, eyes closed.

They’ve made it here. They are together, even apart. And these few quiet moments will help when after days of separation, the ugly fear that resides in Anthony will rise and whisper that he’s been left again. That he is alone. That he was a fool to think it would not end this way. And there will not be enough alcohol to quiet it, but he will remind himself of Matthew’s steadfast heartbeat and trust that he will feel it again.

And so calmed, Anthony kisses him again, and gives him a gentle push.

“Away with you then,” he smiles. “You’re cutting into my moping time.”

“The foulest of sins,” Matt agrees, but he does step back, taking up his smaller bag with the most necessary belongings and slinging it over his shoulder. He will return in the morning to bring Anthony home, he will have a few stolen moments with him before he must introduce him to his family.

He sends Anthony a salute, a grin, a wink, and unlocks the door again to let himself out. 

“Please sleep,” he tells him, and with that, he’s gone.

\---

_To the esteemed Professor Graham and his houseboy,_

_I write to you now as if I were an explorer in darkest Africa, amidst high-rises instead of jungle, and cars driving the wrong way rather than marauding elephants. The rebel colonies have been kind to me so far, though this is perhaps due to seeing no more than a taxi’s ride worth of them before shuttering myself like an invalid in a posh hotel with a contraband bottle of bordeaux at my side._

_You see what this place has done to me - I’d not even set foot upon its soil before I was already deemed a criminal. Sodomy and buggery, intoxication and perversion. Petty theft of as many bottles of wine as I could fit into my belongings before leaving the ship._

_Mr. Brown has departed for his tribe, undoubtedly ensconced in embraces, filled with familiar foods, and - I don’t know, doing devotionals to the Pope. I am alone, and so I write to you. How very little our habits change, and yet how very different the circumstances in which they emerge._

_I owe your kitchen help a debt it seems, Prof. Graham. It seems that despite all odds being heretofore in my favor, I have failed to cease the inevitable passage of time and the maturity that grinds youth’s eager seed to meal. Rather than prevent Mr. Brown from going to his family tonight, and pinning him selfishly to my bed in favor of enormously illegal activities, I bade him go on his way to his family, who loves him._

_I thought at first what a strange thing it must be, to be desired near and appreciated by one’s own. I daresay it helped to imagine you all as filling that position for me._

_Yours even in America,  
A.D._

_Postscript: It helped to imagine that for a moment, before I recalled in short order that you are both terrible. It is only in spite of this incontrovertible fact that I am able to cherish you far more than either of you deserve._

_Post-postscript: Send gin._

\---

Matt chooses to walk home from the hotel; it isn't far, and he delights in taking in his city again. He feels as though he has grown while he's been away, as if he were taller somehow, and the streets seem from a different angle than before. But this place that once he could not wait to escape no longer feels stifling to him. He knows he has the choice, now, to leave and return as he wishes to the streets that clatter with trolleys and the cries of industry.

He stops at a corner store to buy his mother flowers, and continues on.

The deeper he gets into his old neighbourhood, up and down the hills with the rustle of familiar trees around him, the more his excitement bubbles. He can feel his smile growing, can feel his feet walk faster as he finds himself two blocks away, one block away, at the end of his street.

He bites his lip and turns into it, head ducked and smile wide. He doesn't know what to expect. He doesn't know who will be home to greet him. He doesn't know if his eldest sisters are still in Baltimore at all. All he has are the letters he had shared with Beth and his mother, and what scant information he could get from them.

His feet find the short path to his door by themselves and he needn't even knock before the door and screen fly open and he has to catch his sister in a tight embrace to avoid them both toppling.

“I thought you weren't coming ‘til tomorrow, I could've sworn,” Beth laughs, clinging to her brother, her twin in all but age. “Mama’s going to cry, you know she is.”

Matt swings her in a circle with a laugh, fighting down an excitement that damn near trembles through his limbs. He buries his face in her hair and for a moment simply relents to the dizzy relief in being home. Home as much as Cambridge is, home as much as Oxford is becoming. One needn’t replace the other, and how lucky he is to have so many.

“Look at you!” Matt declares, when he finally steadies himself to let Beth loose. She gives a little twirl and gathers her fingers against her mouth, laughing shy. “You’re nearly as tall as me!”

“You’re pretty short,” she grins. Her fingers press against the waist of her dress to smooth it, and in her eyes are so many questions - big ones and small ones, comfortable ones and secret ones. Matt understands, but for now suffices to pluck a carnation from the bunch and offer it to her.

“I missed you,” he says. “All of you. Are they home?”

“Waiting for you,” smiles Beth, as she slips the flower behind her ear. “Even daddy took the day off.”

“He’s never taken a day off in his life.”

Beth just lifts a brow and shrugs, laughing, before she wraps her arm around his and drags her brother inside.

It is a shock, immediately, how tiny the house is. Cramped halls that won't allow two past at a time, stairs that slant to one side. Matt had forgotten, living in spacious dormitories and later in Anthony’s home. But he had lived here, once, moving in rhythm with all the others, knowing when to duck his head and which shrill floorboards to skip. He had grown up here and known nothing else. He has only a moment to linger on the thought before voices fill his ears and he is surrounded by tugging arms and warm bodies and his family is holding him near.

Ellie and Esther are no longer the little things Matt could once lift under both arms and carry through the house. They’ve matured into lovely young ladies, near-impossible to tell apart. His mother, conversely, is smaller, hair greyer and face a mask of utter loveliness. She has not aged but for her posture, and even that is proudly held even as he wipes tears from beneath her eyes at seeing her only son again.

“Mama,” he sighs, laughing. The flowers go to her, and then immediately behind Matt’s back again as she hugs him near and whispers prayers and thanks for having him home safe. Matt doesn’t think he has ever felt more blessed in his entire life, than now.

“My, you really have grown,” Annabelle tells him from the stairs, her hair hanging over her shoulder in a long plait. She’s smiling, as the others are, and although they’ve never been as close as the younger siblings, her warmth is welcome. “All that rowing.”

Matt grins, sheepish. “That and all the books I have to carry around.”

The smell of the place - soda bread and coddle, pipe tobacco and old upholstery - and the sound of their voices spin Matthew’s head. How could he have stayed away for so long from somewhere that resonates in his very marrow?

“Still studying medicine?” Mrs. Brown asks. “You know I brag to everyone about it, terrible prideful that my son is off in England learning to become a doctor.”

Matt doesn’t amend her words, but only smiles wide, as he’s escorted - with much fussing - to the little living room that can scarcely seat them all. Annabelle sits on the floor beside their mother. The twins occupy an armchair. Beth sits on the arm of the couch beside her brother, but Matt stands as soon as he hears the first booted footfall thud heavy against the floor.

It’s as if he’s a boy again, pulling his shoulders back and his spine straight, rather than a man who perhaps need not concern himself so much with impressing his father. All that falls away. He straightens his shirt and as Mr. Brown enters - a smile touching the corners of his eyes, rather than his mouth - Matthew offers his hand, fighting down a smile of his own.

“I’m told you took a day off,” he says. “Must be a special occasion.”

“Must be.” His handshake is firm, and Matthew finds he can’t help but smile that he can now hold it without wincing. When his father drags him nearer, Matt goes, one arm out to embrace his wide shoulders, face pressed against his neck. 

He has missed him. Of all the people he did not think he would miss, he has missed his father. Large, imposing, loud, never abusive but always abrasive, this man has been pushing Matt from the day he could walk to be the man of the house, to make him proud, to provide an heir. He thinks that if there is one person in the world who will never know of his choices, it will be him.

Some hope is kinder than none at all.

“You doing well in your studies?”

“Yes, sir,” Matt grins. “Best in two of my classes.”

“Two?”

“Of four,” his son replies, proud. “And I’ve been moved to the front for rowing for the next race.”

Mr. Brown laughs loud, always a single brash _ha!_ that fills Matt with a pride that feels as if his lungs are too big for his ribcage. He gets a clap on the shoulder, before the man stoops - slowly, with a grimace from a life lived hard in his work - to press a kiss to Mrs. Brown’s hair.

“That’s our boy,” he says. “Aiming for best in four of four?”

“Doing my best,” Matt answers, abashed and amused all at once. “Yes sir,” he amends. “Next term, best all around.”

“And you’ll knock that other school right out of the water too, I’ll bet. What’s it called again?”

“Oxford,” Matt says. “Though we just call it ‘the other place’ so you had it right.”

“What’s England like?” Ellie asks, earning a nudge from Ester for interrupting.

Matt laughs, drawing a hand through his hair and going when Beth tugs him to sit on the chair next to her. “It’s small,” he says at last. “Much smaller than here. Like a little village. And everyone speaks with a very strange accent,” he says, mimicking Anthony’s accent and smiling when his family all laugh. 

“They do not!”

“They do!”

“Nah-uh,” Ellie laughs, “it’s too funny, no one talks that funny.”

“My friend - my professor - will come by tomorrow for dinner and you can hear for yourself.”

They were told about this, in a sense, in the letter that Matt sent announcing his visit. A professor and his tutor, who was curious to see America. Little more was said than that, because no matter how Matthew tried to phrase anything, it all seemed suspect when he read over it again. All he can hope now is that he’s seen as charming, rather than queer, that his carriage reads as eccentric rather than suspect, that they would like to see him again, rather than being content with only the single planned supper.

Matthew hopes, and can do no more than wait and see.

“Is it pretty there,” Esther asks, made brave by her sister. Matthew nods, very seriously.

“London is a busy city, just like here, but outside of it there are hills and fields and forests. We row along rivers that wind by the school. There are castles-”

“Castles!”

“Yes,” he tells her, laughing. “Big ones and small ones.”

“Pretty girls, too?” his father asks, brow raised and a smile playing in the corners of his eyes.

Matt stumbles here, and hopes it looks like genuine bashfulness rather than panic and worry. He shrugs, which earns another laugh from his sisters and his mother, and tugs his hair again.

“When we get to go to the city, sure,” he says. “I suppose.”

“I’m glad there aren’t any girls at school with you,” Beth butts in, gently shoving her brother with a smile. “You’d get distracted with girls there.”

“It’s true,” his mother sighs. “Boys and girls can’t go to school together, nor college.”

“I’ll go to college though, won’t I mama?” Beth asks, and her mother gently flicks a towel at her and shakes her head, smile bright despite how she tries to put on an air of displeasure. All of her children have done her proud in their education. “It’s where Mary is now,” Beth adds, for Matthew. “It’s why she couldn’t come down, too far by train and she has exams.”

“Over summer?”

“Nursing never rests.”

“Mary went into nursing?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

Matt shakes his head, but maintains his smile despite the twinge of sadness this yields in him. So much has changed, their communications hard to maintain and he certainly lacking on his side of it, with classes and rowing and Anthony. He draws a breath and laughs a little, as questions pour in from all sides. He does his best to keep up with them, asking his own in return, learning about all the changes and revelling about all that’s stayed the same. After a while, his sisters are scattered with towel-swats and his mother’s insistence that she feed her wayward son.

Matthew can’t imagine many things in the world that sound better than that.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Mr. Brown, will you get into bed with me or are we to continue conversing like uncivilized people.”_
> 
> _“I can’t,” Matthew laughs. “If I get into bed now neither of us will leave it, and it’s now nearing ten in the morning. We haven’t the time.”_
> 
> _“Ten! You say that as if it were going on tea time,” Anthony declares with grand displeasure._

They stay up late talking, all of them gathered around the little kitchen table. First it’s piled up with dinner, then with sweet treats brought for Matthew’s visit specifically - which delights the twins more than it does their brother. Then Ellie and Esther are sent to bed, and the elder children and their parents stay to talk. 

Annabelle and Beth and Matthew stay longer than their parents do, who excuse themselves for bed and promise to see Matt in the morning before he makes his way into the city again. Several hours later, Annabelle stands and makes her leave, and Matthew and Beth are left alone. She gives him a look and he lifts his chin to direct them both to the porch.

Their parent’s room is, mercifully, at the back of the house, and the twins have moved into Mary’s old room near them. It gives them space enough to enjoy each other’s company and talk, now, undisturbed. She shoves his shoulder and Matt narrows his eyes, before pulling a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. Beth’s eyes widen.

“Don’t tell me you do too!”

“Everyone at school does,” he replies with a shrug. “Habit, now.”

“Can I have one?”

“You’ll hate it.”

“You’ll give it anyway. Let me have one.”

Matthew laughs and sets two between his lips to light before handing one to his sister. He exhales long, and she holds the thing with a little misgiving, but adjusts to mirror how her brother has his.

“A little drag to get some smoke in your mouth, and then take it out and breathe in a normal breath.”

Beth squints, affecting a pose like she saw in a movie once, hand on her hip and cigarette perched between her fingers. She does what Matthew said, a little puff, and then a deep breath, and it all coughs loose in a laughing sputter that nearly causes her to drop it. Her nose is wrinkled as she stands upright, disgust and amusement mingling.

“It’s awful.”

“I told you.”

“Did I look fashionable?”

“Very,” Matt grins, as he settles to the edge of the porch, and Beth sweeps her skirt beneath her to join him. She holds the cigarette, rather than attempting it again, watching Matthew watch the sky.

The city’s distant lights dim some of the stars, but not all of them. It gives him goosebumps to hear the wind in the trees, a rustle that he knows intimately, having heard it all his life. It sounds like nowhere else he’s ever been, the night-time sounds of a car rattling by joining in the quiet city noises. With a small smile, he ducks his head, and glances towards Beth.

“What?”

“I’ve missed you,” he tells her. “And I’ve missed home.”

“Must be so different coming back after England.”

Matt laughs and nods, bringing the cigarette to his lips again and exhaling towards the sky. “I never remembered it being so small,” he admits. “It’s home, it always will be, but -”

“It’s easier with Mary and Anna living away,” Beth says, then she grins and scoots nearer, pressing her shoulder to Matthew’s. “But it must be nothing like where you live in Cambridge!”

“Christ,” Matt sighs, ducking a flick against his temple from his sibling and holding up a hand in apology. “Bethy, if only you could see it, it’s a palace.”

She hums, eyes closed for a moment as if trying to envision it. “Tell me.”

“Two floors, but each twice - no, three or four times the size of this. Living room big as if you knocked down all the bedroom walls. Bedrooms we don’t even use, and a bathroom that’s got a tub the size of my bed here -”

“We?”

Matt parts his lips and watches her a moment before setting the filter between his teeth again and sucking deep. His blush is genuine and warm. It’s strange to talk about his life in England honestly, here, it feels so forbidden. But he knows, hell or high water, Beth will not tell a soul - she never has.

“My friend and I,” he carefully says.

She nods, once, after a moment of thought. So carefully in her letters, she’s tried to appeal to the religion that they share, but never with threat of judgment or mention of sin. Beth can’t help it any more than Matthew, and what he has seen of the world that has loosened their faith’s hold on him has not yet happened for her.

But she loves him, entirely, and could never cast aspersions on something like love, even when her fear for him - stemming from that same affection - drove her to speak.

Finally she smiles a little, and admits in quiet conspiracy, “You didn’t tell me you live in a palace.”

“You should see his family’s house,” Matt grins, his gratitude evident without a word needing to be spoken between them.

“Tell me,” Beth asks him. “And tell me about your friend, now that you can. He writes poetry?”

So Matt does, he tells her of the estate and the old house. He tells her of the rolling hills and tapestries. He tells her of the grandiose presentation and the few lovely people amidst the dusty old money mentality. He laughs when Beth asks if this is the man who had written the books she had helped Matt hide, and nods. He smiles when she reminds him that she rather liked the poetry.

One cigarette becomes two for Matt, and Beth leans her head against his shoulder, watching the sky as he talks of rowing and how different it is to punting, when he describes the school’s grounds and the buildings he loves most. She hums contentment when he tells her of the chapel, and how he goes, when he can, and prays for her and for home.

He hasn’t forgotten, he never wants to.

“He’s terrified to meet you,” Matt confesses after a while. “Anthony. He’s so frightened that he will do or say something wrong.”

“Do you think he might?”

Matt makes a wavering sound at this, then laughs. “No, I think he’ll… he’ll do his best. He’ll have to pin his wings up for a bit but I think - I hope - you’ll all find him charming.”

Beth arches a brow. “He isn’t an angel.”

“No,” Matt grins, running a hand along his face. He doesn’t explain the joke - it doesn’t really matter. “No, he’s definitely not that,” he agrees again, ashing his cigarette over the edge of the porch.

“Is he faithful?”

“Not that either.”

Beth clicks her tongue against her teeth, chiding, but smiles a little anyway. “Couldn’t have found a nice Catholic, could you? There’s plenty of them that’s bent.” Cheeks reddening, Matthew doesn’t argue this either. “Does he pray at least?”

“I don’t think so. He doesn’t believe in sin.”

At this, Beth’s eyes widen. She’d never considered that before. A pensive thoughtfulness that draws out a few long moments, as Matthew spools another ribbon of smoke past his lips. “I guess that’s the catch,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what we think of it, it matters what God thinks of it. That’s why we have to make our confessions and do our penance. We’re allowed to make all sorts of mistakes so long as we care to right them. Do you pray for him?”

“I do,” Matt says, earnest. It is a gentle thing to ask, tender-hearted in a way that aches warmly inside him. She doesn’t judge, she doesn’t chastise. But in her own way, in the world that she knows, she cares that the man her brother cares for, is taken care of in the way that matters most to her.

Beth nods, sagely, satisfied by this at least. She brings her feet up to the topmost step and works her shoes off, setting them aside. Atop her knees, she folds her arms, mischief in her eyes, and a quiet curiosity. “Is he kind to you?”

Matt’s smile says enough and he rests his cheek against his palm and nods, ashing his cigarette with a flick of his nail against the filter.

“I’ve never felt so loved,” he admits. He remembers the beginning, when he had worried that what he was doing was selfish and stupid, that Anthony Dimmond had no care for him but for what they could do together before summer let school out. He remembers the worry, he remembers both of their tears. “And I’ve never loved someone so much. He claims I’ve made an honest man out of him.”

“You probably have,” Beth laughs. “If anyone could it would be a Brown.”

Matt laughs, stubbing his cigarette out against the porch, and flicking the filter far off into the grass. “That,” he agrees, “would be a miracle.”

\---

The room is quiet when Matt enters, curtains pulled to block out the morning sun that still spills through in rivulets of gold. He closes the door quietly behind him, surveying the damage done in his single night of absence. To his pleasant surprise, there is none. One of the bags has been opened, a few suits hung in the closet. There is a crystal tumbler on the desk that in it holds a dredge of burgundy liquid - a finger’s worth, no doubt Anthony’s most notable act of restraint in saving a little hair of the dog for morning. He is unsurprised as he enters to see a letter already addressed to Mssrs. Graham and Lecter, the Dr. on the second name scratched out deliberately.

And beneath the blankets, the lump that is his poet, a tuft of silver-streaked hair just visible against the pillow.

Matt has missed him. Strange and welcome as it had been to sleep in his old bed again, Matt realized he couldn’t get to sleep as much for nerves as because he has grown so used to sleeping with another at his side.

This other at his side.

Anthony takes a deeper breath than the rest before settling to slumber once more. Matt bites his lip and toes off his shoes before sneaking closer. He sets his knees to the bed and bends over his poet, nuzzling into his hair and breathing in his familiar sleepy smell.

“I dreamed of you last night,” he whispers, uncaring if Anthony is still asleep and doesn’t hear. “Made waking achingly hard this morning.”

The grumble that rises is half a snore, and Matt grins, delighted to hear his poet’s fussy sleepy noises again. Anthony shoulders his blankets higher, burying his face further beneath them, and after a long sigh, he goes still again.

“I talked about you last night,” Matt continues, as he slowly, carefully lowers himself to the bed behind Anthony. “I told my sister - Beth, I’ve talked about her before - that I love you. That there’s no one outside our family I’ve ever loved more. Can you believe it? She’s always known, you know - how I am. But I didn’t ever tell her much because she worries,” he says, smile spreading. “My immortal soul and all that.”

He lifts his fingers and hardly touching, traces the curve of Anthony’s spine, pressing only enough to bend in the blankets and feel a brush of knobby bone. One after the next after the next.

“But she wants to meet you. The others are being cordial, but Beth is - I think she’s really excited. I told her about our home. Your family’s home. I started to think that maybe she could come visit, sometime. It would be good for her to see the world. She’s smart, and -”

“Don’t you dare ask these kinds of things so early in the day,” mutters Anthony. “You know I’d say yes anyway, you needn’t bloody wake me with it.”

“I love you.”

“You’re a monster. It’s barely past dawn,” Anthony mumbles, curling further under the sheets as Matt crawls over him and lays atop him like a blanket himself. “You’re bloody heavy.”

“I missed you.”

“I did no such thing,” Anthony replies, settling more comfortably beneath his boy and tugging down the blanket for Matt to nuzzle him from where he lies. “I enjoyed my first night of bachelor freedom in a good many months.”

“You whined in a letter.”

“In several,” Anthony counters pointedly. “Mr. Brown, will you get into bed with me or are we to continue conversing like uncivilized people.”

“I can’t,” Matthew laughs. “If I get into bed now neither of us will leave it, and it’s now nearing ten in the morning. We haven’t the time.”

“Ten! You say that as if it were going on tea time,” Anthony declares with grand displeasure. But he relents in his coaxing and contents himself with stroking through Matthew’s hair, and through a squinted gaze, watching him so close again. “They’re well?”

“Very,” he says, turning his cheek against Anthony’s palm when it frames his cheek. “Mary’s gone off to nursing school.”

“What an admirable quality to run in a family.”

“Was that a genuine compliment, Anthony Dimmond? One night on American soil and you’re already getting emotional.”

Anthony snorts, trying to hide his sleepy grin beneath his hand as he rubs the sleep from his eyes. “I made a new acquaintance last night. The porter downstairs? Apparently I am not the only guest who desires a certain degree of tipple in the evening.”

Matt snorts and presses his nose against Anthony’s neck, wriggling nearer to press his lips there next as his professor obediently lifts his chin and sighs.

“You’re truly terrible,” Matt tells him. “Truly. All I did was give my sister a cigarette to try.”

“Unconscionable,” Anthony declares. “What a dreadful influence you are.”

“She coughed once, and then held it until it burned out.”

“Even worse. Wasted cigarettes are no laughing matter.”

Matt laughs, and the spill of his breath against Anthony’s throat sends an arching shiver through his poet. His fingers curl a little tighter in Matthew’s hair, and he tugs just enough to bend their mouths together. A chaste kiss, first, that merely warms their lips. The second spreads the heat between them, tasting of wine and tobacco. Anthony lifts his hips, to make clear - and pressing - his sleepy morning desires.

“No,” Matthew whispers, grinning, against his mouth.

“Give me one last sin before I’m dragged kicking to salvation.”

“Just one?”

“Just one,” Anthony says, licking his lips and rolling to his back as Matt wriggles against his front - still dressed, terrible boy.

“So what’s that on the table?”

“What table?”

“In the tumbler?”

“That’s hardly a sin,” Anthony snorts. “Not even half a sin. Two fingers of sin.”

“I’ll give you two fingers of sin,” Matt mutters and grins when Anthony blinks at him, delighted. With a shake of his head Matthew leans in to kiss his poet once more, languid and lazy, feeling his own body inevitably respond to the pleasure of being so near him again. “We should…” He sighs, slipping his fingers into Anthony’s hair in turn. “Just -”

“Stay.”

“No,” Matt laughs, nuzzling against Anthony. “No we should… go. And be good. And - fuck it, we have to be good all goddamn day.” His laugh rises in pitch then drops in tone as Anthony grips his hair with one hand and slips his other down to grope against the curve of his bottom. “But not - not that - they’ll know, just… eyes like fucking hawks. Let me suck you.”

“You flatter me,” Anthony responds, surprised. “Do I make you limp? How delightful.”

“Hush,” Matt scolds him, and Anthony can do no more than laugh helpless against his hand.

He makes a sound of alarm as the blankets are peeled from him, but Matt’s hand against his bare stomach holds him where he is. The blankets return with a flourish, pulled over Matthew’s head as he settles to his knees, legs spread over Anthony’s shins.

“I don’t even get to watch,” Anthony asks, dismayed.

“No,” comes his student’s voice, muffled beneath the sheets. “You get to experience this with every other sense instead.”

“Sadist,” Anthony sighs, very happy to settle beneath Matthew’s warm breath, eyes to the ceiling. He will peek, he knows he will, as well as Matt does, but for now he is content to let his boy pleasure him this way. He sets a hand against Matt’s hair through the blanket and strokes there, smiling when he feels familiar hot kisses against his thighs and up over the points of his hips, teasing.

He knows well enough how lovely his lips pucker, yielding little kisses - chaste things, but for where they’re now placed. He knows too how Matthew’s eyes hood when his kisses are open-mouthed and hot, and the way his cheeks shadow, hollowed in a lingering suck. He knows the shape of Matthew’s jaw as it rubs against his leg, and the length of the bridge of his nose as Matthew nuzzles against Anthony’s groin to spread his legs a little wider.

He knows Matthew, every hair on his head and every sound he makes and every motion of his body. No matter how intense Anthony’s fires have burned for others - some lingering, most snuffed - there has never been a man in his bed for so long that Anthony knows their body and mind and heart as if it were his own. Enough that he would find himself in a hotel room far from home. Enough that he would undertake that just to meet his family, under mostly false pretenses.

“Christ,” Anthony sighs, as Matt’s lips finally close against his flushed, full shaft, and force an upward twitch of arousal through his cock. “I love you.”

“I love you,” Matt answers, voice muffled beneath the blankets. “Stop swearing.”

Anthony laughs again and sneaks his hand beneath the blankets to stroke through Matt’s messy hair, letting the curls coil around his fingers before he tightens them and tugs. Matthew murmurs something that sounds ridiculously like a prayer, but before Anthony has a chance to venture further with asking, he is enveloped by welcome, familiar, perfect heat.

Matthew’s voice joins Anthony’s in his low hum of pleasure, and that makes it all the more immersive. Anthony slips deeper under the blankets and grins when Matt holds his thighs tight and spread as he wants them, stopping the man, for now, from arching up and thrusting into his mouth.

“Horrid, dreadful boy,” Anthony purrs, tongue pressing against his top lip as his breath leaves him in a huff of needy pleasure. “How I’ve missed you.”

He knows by the pitch of Matthew’s hum that he’s asking a question, and Anthony grins, knowing just what he’s asking. As if his cock filling Matthew’s mouth might stop Anthony from hearing his insolence. Nonsense.

“I’ve missed this,” Anthony corrects. “Is that better?”

Teeth scrape along his shaft in answer and despite Matthew’s firm grip on him, Anthony bucks upward, outside of his control. He grins sleepily, accepting the reprimand - entirely deserved - and settling again into a steady rocking upward into his student’s mouth. Delicate skin, filled taut and flushed, strokes across Matthew’s tongue, pressing inward his lips and then tugging them slick back out again.

“A far better way to wake up,” Anthony murmurs, as he lifts the sheets finally to peek beneath, “than reminding me that I’m going to be late to my lecture.”

Bright eyes flick up and narrow as Matthew watches him from between Anthony’s legs. He doesn’t stop sucking, he blinks slowly and keeps his gaze on his professor as he takes him deeper, throat clicking when he swallows around him before pulling back. Anthony strokes his hair from his face and cups Matt’s cheek as his boy ducks down to take him into his mouth again, flushed and lovely, having missed this just as much as Anthony had.

They are both stubborn, both lovely things in their own way. Matthew is happy to be home, and for a few weeks more, he will spend time with his family. Some evenings, having escorted Anthony home, he will climb into his bed and take his pleasure with the man he loves before returning. He loves him, law or no law, and no man or god can come between them.

Matt drags his teeth softly along Anthony’s length before kissing his way down to his balls. Taking those between his lips next and closing his eyes in pleasure, he buries his nose in the wiry hair at the base of Anthony’s cock. His poet moans, heady as any wine and just as intoxicating. Arching back against the bed, Anthony drapes his arm across his eyes and relents to sensation alone rather than sight. Matthew breathes in deep, a whimper carrying his breath loose to pool warm across the thickened shaft of Anthony’s cock.

When he lets his balls slip free, the cooling of his spit against that delicate skin ripples a shiver up Anthony’s spine. Matthew earns another, with a sucking kiss turned sideways against the base of his cock. Another, when he follows the firm ridge of it with the tip of his tongue, and using his fingers to slip back his poet’s foreskin, traces the frenulum that bridges tight between cockhead and covering.

Anthony swears in French this time, instead of English.

Matt loves him so much in that moment he aches.

He takes his time teasing and exploring his partner, long enough together now to understand how to hold Anthony on edge instead of immediately tugging him over.

He watches his poet squirm and tremble, watches his chest heave up with every breath. Matt strokes a hand down the center of it as he relents and just nuzzles against Anthony for a moment. He breathes deep the muskiness of him, the masculine smell he so adores. He adorns Anthony's skin with kisses before deliberately swallowing him down again.

His nails leave soft marks against Anthony's chest as he draws his hand away and he moans when his poet tugs his hair and whimpers his name.

He knows from the clench that snaps tight Anthony’s body that he didn’t want to finish so soon, but it hardly lessens his pleasure, nor the streams of semen that jettison roping thick against the back of Matthew’s mouth. Anthony’s groan sinks low, his body doing the same in lengthening waves of movement, snaring taut and loosening, weighing heavily towards the bed. Anthony turns his palm against his eye and moans trembling as Matthew’s throat works swallowing around him.

“I cannot go today,” Anthony declares in a rough-throated whisper, as Matthew licks up the last seeping bead of seed from the tip of his poet’s dick, and comes to lay beside him.

“Why not?”

“I need to write an ode to your mouth and all its wonders.”

“Another one?” Matthew laughs, and Anthony grins crooked, arm still slung across his eyes. “You’re coming with me.”

“But-”

“You never write after you’ve ejaculated, and you know it,” he says. “Now wash up and put on something nice.”

“I’ve told you already, I cannot.”

“Anthony-”

“Not,” he says, pressing Matthew to his back and slinking down his body, “before I thank you for such a remarkable wake-up call.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Say it again!” Esther adds._
> 
> _Anthony regards Matthew at some length, not at all dismayed but pleasantly bewildered. The man can remember less than a handful of times he’s been in the presence of children in more than a passing way. Though the girls are perhaps only a decade younger than Matthew, they are young enough yet that Anthony isn’t entirely sure how to respond._
> 
> _So he does what Esther asked._
> 
> _“I am Mr. Brown’s professor,” Anthony says, “and his friend. Anthony Dimmond.”_

Anthony has never been more nervous in his life.

When he fled home - as he prefers to think of it, rather than being shoved unceremoniously out the front door - he went with his chin held high and a steadiness in his shoulders that did not betray any of the roiling fear inside him. When he gave his first reading of thinly-veiled fairy poems to a room of very somber married couples, he did so with enormous, visceral pleasure. When the war came, he was stalwart for his friends, dragging them home to keep them safe, barricading the door with his body to stop them from leaving, even when they went. There was a fear, then, a terrible and dreadful weight that still has left its marks embedded deep within him.

But none of that amounts to the sheer calamity of anxiety that rattles him now. That fear was the thud of a timpani, the almost inaudible thump of anti-aircraft missiles. This one is higher, more shrill, vibrating at a frequency akin to the whistling of a mosquito against one’s ear.

And it only grows more persistent as their car rolls to a stop before a ramshackle little house, as unassuming as it is profound in the endless terrible potentialities that Anthony imagines.

“Smoke a cigarette outside on the corner,” Matthew tells him, as Anthony merely hands the boy his wallet rather than fumble with his American money. It’s a blessing, really, that Matthew sucked him dry before this. Anthony cannot imagine how he might feel now were he not still comparably calmed by his orgasm not an hour before.

His wallet returned and the driver paid, Anthony slips it into his pocket and emerges onto the quiet little street where the man he loved was once a boy. He absorbs it in uncharacteristic silence, taking in the sound of the car’s crunching over the uneven road and the endless whisper of wind in the trees. He does, dutifully, go to the corner before fumbling a cigarette to life between his lips.

He wishes he hadn’t worn a waistcoat. No one in America does, in their miserable boxy cuts that make them all have a figure akin to an icebox. He wishes he’d not worn a brown suit, but something quieter still than the rich velveteen brown that hugs snug to his form. He wishes he hadn’t worn a bow-tie, let alone a red one. A bow-tie! What in God’s name was he thinking?

Even the passing curse, unspoken, resonates ill, outside this house of the penitent faithful.

Anthony takes solace instead not in himself, but in Matthew. Bright, handsome Matthew, who ambles closer with an easy grin and his hands in his pockets. He is beautiful, always, but here he’s positively radiant. Anthony’s heart aches to think that this boy has taken him across the sea to share with him such intimate details of his life.

He will be good for him.

He will be at his best for him.

Matthew’s best, not his own.

 _I love you_ , Anthony mouths to him, and Matthew ducks his head and laughs at what surely seems like the desperate plea of a man being walked to his own gallows.

Matt comes to stand next to him and leans in such a way as to press his warmth to Anthony, hip to shoulder, and make it appear accidental for anyone looking. The same words, but not voiced, and Anthony's fingers tremble as he ashes his cigarette.

“My father is at work until the evening,” Matt tells him again. “Only my mother and sisters are home. The twins will think your accent silly. Beth will…” Matt laughs and shakes his head. “I truly don't know what Beth will do.”

“And your mother?”

“Will ask questions,” Matthew tells him. “Of England and your studies. She is clever, she would love to speak with you of poetry. Though perhaps not yours.”

“Perhaps not today,” Anthony agrees, taking another drag of his cigarette. He should have dressed less strangely. He should have combed his hair more. He should have worn a scarf, another coat, dyed the grey from his hair -

“Breathe,” Matthew reminds him softly, smiling in lieu of kissing him as he normally would. “Please breathe. We may go at any time you wish, you've no obligation to stay.”

Anthony’s thumbnail catches a dozen times against the filter of his cigarette, quick flicks continuing long after the ash has fallen. He finally sighs long the breath he didn’t realize he was holding until it dizzied him.

“Families are not my forte,” he declares solemnly. “I will endeavor.”

And with this, he takes a final, searing drag from his cigarette, flicks it arching towards the street, and pulls himself up tall. Matthew extends a hand to allow his poet passage, and Anthony ascends the flaking-paint steps of the porch, lifting his hand to knock against - well, it’s a screen, so he taps his knuckles instead against the frame. It clatters a bit more loudly than he’d intended, and fighting down a smile, Matthew reaches past him to open the screen door, and the one behind.

“It’s not locked,” he laughs.

Anthony squints at him, and enters.

As Matthew calls out to his family, Anthony takes a moment to adjust to the feel of the place. Lit as best it can be through the shutters across its windows, it is a home that has been mismatched by time and occupancy, furniture and rugs and decor added in bits and pieces, creating a whole out of many portions. And yet there is a warmth in this, to know that he is seeing lifetimes lived here, as one might measure time’s passage by the rings of a tree. This is not his ancestral estate, matching resolutely in blocks of time, one overriding the next and the previous disappearing to attics and storage spaces. This is not their Cambridge home, glutted thick with Anthony’s detritus.

This is where Matthew lived before. This is where he was born, where he grew, where he found himself. This is where he found Anthony, for that matter, in the spaces between his words.

“How very charming,” Anthony says, offering Matthew a fleeting smile.

Matt snorts and says nothing. He waits. Predictably, it’s the twins that run in first.

“Mama’s hanging the washing,” Ellie explains.

“And we were told to help, but we didn’t want to,” Esther adds, crossing her arms. “We knew you were coming later and we wanted to see you. I’m sure she won’t mind.”

“And Beth?” Matt asks, amused, tilting his head to regard the two of them as they regard Anthony.

“She’s still helping,” Ellie says. “Are you Matthew’s friend?” This, of course, directed at Anthony, with barely a pause to allow him a moment to form a reply.

“I am Mr. Brown’s professor, yes,” Anthony replies, blinking wide in a moment of transparent surprise when the girls burst into wild giggling laughter.

“Mr. Brown!” Ellie squeals.

“Say it again!” Esther adds.

Anthony regards Matthew at some length, not at all dismayed but pleasantly bewildered. The man can remember less than a handful of times he’s been in the presence of children in more than a passing way. Though the girls are perhaps only a decade younger than Matthew, they are young enough yet that Anthony isn’t entirely sure how to respond.

So he does what Esther asked.

“I am Mr. Brown’s professor,” Anthony says, “and his friend. Anthony Dimmond.”

Another peal of delight from the girls, and Anthony has to fight down a smile. He offers his hand to the one on the left, who announces herself as Ellie, and then to the other, Esther. He immediately takes note of the arrangement of their hair, certain that once it changes, he will no longer be able to tell one from the other.

“Miss Ellie,” he says. “Miss Esther. A pleasure.”

“Matty, is everyone in England so fancy?” Ellie asks, just as Esther turns to Anthony to ask him the same thing.

“You’ve a really funny accent Mister Dimmond,” she admits. “Matty tried to copy it before but he can’t do it as well as you. Does everyone talk like that?”

“Mr. Dimmond is especially fancy,” Matthew answers, as Anthony gives him a dry look. He’s relieved to have an answer, though, as to what the girls were so delighted by, and not at all opposed to being easily entertaining. He normally has to work much harder at coming anywhere near being so amusing.

“Everyone there talks something like this,” Anthony says, agreeably. He lilts his voice to an Irish trill, and adds, “Though some of them speak like this.” And then a Scottish brogue. “And others are very gruff like this.” And then a nasal Cockney twang. “And then there’s some what talk like this.”

Christ. He’s been here not fully five minutes and he’s already putting on voices for children.

But if anything is justification for the effort, it’s the laughter and genuine delight the girls get from listening. Young as they are, and prone as children that age can be to tactlessness, both Ellie and Esther laugh with Anthony, not at him. They ask questions to better their knowledge, not to put him in a situation he would find uncomfortable.

“You two should be helping with the washing.” This voice has a twang a little more like Matthew’s, and it’s lower. “Out with you, or mama’ll make you scrub next time too, like she does me.”

Ellie steps forward to take Anthony’s hand again as Esther runs off, the shyer of the two. “I’ll try to talk like you by dinner time Mister Dimmond,” she promises, before ducking a fond shove from her brother and running out towards the back of the house. Matt shakes his head and murmurs something before turning to his poet again.

“Anthony Dimmond, Bethany Brown.”

It’s like a bloody receiving line, but Anthony turns with his winningest smile that immediately falters when he sees her. She arches a brow at his expression, though her own smile widens a little, and she extends her hand. Anthony kisses the air just above it, but his attention remains held on the dark-haired girl before him, with ruddy cheeks and a long straight nose and ears that stick out just a little.

“My pleasure, Miss Brown,” he says, and continues before he can stop himself. “How remarkably like your brother you look.”

She smiles wider and inclines her head. “We’re mistaken for twins often, though he’s got a year on me. It’s kind of you to find us both so agreeable.” Her gaze flicks away for a moment to her brother before returning to their visitor. “You’ve such a fine suit, I’ve never seen its like. Are all professors so well-dressed at Cambridge? Perhaps you can teach my brother to wear nicer things.”

“I should like to think I am best-dressed amongst them, but it’s hardly competition. With respect to Mr. Brown, one may lead a horse to water, but one cannot force it drink,” he answers, smile twitching to mischievous life, and - as ever - pleased to be complemented. “Something to be added to our tutoring, perhaps. Lessons in sartorialism.”

Beth’s eyes widen a little, but she laughs all the same. “A Pygmalion project, perhaps.”

And then it’s Anthony’s turn to be surprised, though he tries to tame it as best he can. “Precisely so. Your brother mentioned that you have a love of literature.”

“I try to read when I can,” she admits. “When school and church and chores don’t keep me. Matthew was kind enough to leave me most of his books before he went to Cambridge. He tolds me he could get more there as he studied, even though it’s medicine he’s doing, not English.”

“A soul, even scientific, needs the beauty and power of words to warm it as it works for a better world,” Anthony counters, and Beth’s smile turns wonderfully playful for a moment, and she looks, again, so much like her brother it takes Anthony’s breath.

“Matty always loved poetry, those books he didn’t leave me,” she adds after a moment, clasping her hands before her. “What do you read at Cambridge, Mister Dimmond?”

“As professor, or for pleasure?”

“Both.”

Anthony for a moment finds himself struck that Matthew has shared with her so much of Cambridge that she knows its curious vernacular. He cannot help but turn a smile to him, tempered though it is, before regarding his sister again. “I lecture to students reading English and Western European literature and poetry. Dante, Milton, the Romantic poets. Predominantly I teach entering students, so nothing terribly advanced.”

“I’d say there’s a great deal to be dissected in Dante,” Beth says, and Anthony laughs. He can’t help it. With her arched brow and the brashness beneath her words, she is immediately familiar to him, and he finds himself remarkably comfortable revelling in her bright Americanness that is already so intimately known to him through her brother.

“Just so, and thank heavens because it’s afforded me a position there,” he agrees.

“And for pleasure?”

“Everything when I’m stymied in my own writing,” he says, genuine. “Especially dreadful bores that inspire me to fix the mistakes they’ve made. And when my words are working for me, I read nothing at all, lest I be subconsciously influenced, or intimidated by someone’s superior skill.”

“That’s very noble of you,” Beth tells him, and though her smile comes through in her words, they’re earnest. She opens her mouth to say more, but changes her mind, meeting Matt’s eyes for a second before changing the subject entirely. “Mother is so excited to meet you. And father, too, though he’s yet to come home. Would you care for a drink or something to eat while we wait for mother to finish?”

“What do we have?” Matt asks her with a laugh, and Beth shrugs.

“Water, lemonade, fresh milk from the market this morning.”

Anthony spares a mournful thought for his champagne and gin left all alone at home.

“Lemonade would be lovely,” he says, and as she ducks her head in a nod and tries to hide her smile, Beth steps away to fetch him a glass.

It is a brief reprieve, and hardly one at all considering how unexpectedly pleasant their conversation had been and how near Beth remains in the kitchen one room over. But Anthony turns to Matthew with a desperation of which he is not proud and that he will deny entirely later.

“I shouldn’t have said ‘sartorialism’,” he whispers. “Am I a prick? Matthew, am I an utter and insufferable bloody prick? I can’t help it, I was brought up posh, I don’t know why I decided to wear a bloody bow-tie today, I hate bow-ties-”

“Hush,” Matt tells him, and his smile is bright, wide, entirely genuine, not hiding behind it a panic or worry he wishes Anthony not to see. In the moment they have with no one around, he reaches to take Anthony’s hand and squeezes it hard, letting go with a soft laugh. “I rather like the bow-tie.”

“I never wear them.”

“You should,” Matt winks. “More often. You’ve admirably charmed all of my sisters already.”

“I look like every other old fogey professor at bloody Cambridge. A bow-tie,” he moans softly, dismally, before bringing his hand to his mouth to steady himself. He can still feel Matthew’s firm grasp of it, and there is reassurance in that. Yes, he has already charmed the sisters Brown that he has met. He has, despite his sudden and terrible discovery that he is a consummate git, managed to make a good impression.

He can do this. He can absolutely do this. For Matthew, he will do this.

And then the back door snaps shut, and Anthony stiffens as if he’d just been whipped.

Matt seems similarly jarred, straightening and blinking at the empty house before him and the man beside him. Anthony looks like he’s about to faint. It takes a lot not to hold his hand again.

“You’re much taller than I anticipated,” comes a voice, and Matt laughs softly through his teeth. “Very well-carried, Matty didn’t say.”

“I didn’t think it was important,” Matt admits, turning back to look at his mother, his smile softens and he gestures towards Anthony unnecessarily. “Mother, this is Mr. Anthony Dimmond, a professor at Cambridge, a good friend of mine besides.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Brown,” Anthony says, though with hardly the lilt to his words that earlier lightened them. His voice is lower now, a gravitas affected and a somber but polite reserve in his features that makes him seem older than he is. “Thank you for having me.”

It isn’t an act, per se. Matthew has seen Anthony put on airs before, and knows the motions that apply those masks. This is something else, and Matthew for a moment recalls the first time that he met Anthony’s mother.

His heart aches a little at the thought of it.

“Very nice to meet you,” she replies, inclining her head as Anthony dusts a kiss just above her fingers. She withdraws them then, and takes him in, a warm and curious amusement in her eyes towards the tall Englishman now occupying her living room. “Have you found Baltimore agreeable?”

“So far, entirely,” Anthony says, “though I look forward to exploring more of it. I’m only sorry that my wife couldn’t join me, but perhaps next time I come abroad.”

He feels rather than sees Matthew stop moving beside him entirely and doesn’t grace him with a look. Instead, he keeps his eyes on Mrs. Brown before him as she smiles and nods understanding.

“Travel must be difficult for her.”

“She rather enjoys it,” Anthony counters with a gentle laugh. “Unfortunately she was needed at home for her father, this past winter he caught a terrible chill that has yet to leave his lungs.”

“I will pray for his health,” the woman promises, reaching to take Anthony’s hand again for a gentle squeeze. “And for your wife, too. What is her name?”

“Molly,” the poet replies, and Matthew turns on his heel beside him to head into the kitchen before he can say something untoward. “An unusual nickname for Emma, but she’s always preferred it.”

“Molly’s a good Irish name,” Mrs. Brown says with a secretive smile. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“Nothing at all,” Anthony agrees, with a glance to the kitchen - but only the one - as he’s ushered to the sofa to sit beside his lover’s mother.

“Do you have children?”

“Not yet, I’m afraid, but not for lack of trying,” Anthony says, glancing to Beth with a smile as she returns with a glass of lemonade and a very different expression towards him than the one he saw before. His smile falters a little, but strengthens as he looks back to Mrs. Brown.

“Well,” she tells him, resting a hand on his arm, “I’ll pray for that too, then.”

Anthony nods his thanks and takes a sip of the lemonade. It’s lovely, home-made, if not here then nearby. It makes him feel strangely nostalgic, but for what he can’t quite place.

“Professor Dimmond was interested in seeing Baltimore,” Matt says, coming back from the kitchen with a glass of his own. “He’s many friends in New York and has been there often, but rarely to the cities nearby.”

“I’m glad you convinced him to come and see the place you grew up,” his mother says, sitting back and smiling at her son. “It’s lovely that tutors there take an active interest in their students.”

“Very active,” Matt agrees, nodding, crossing one foot over the other as he leans against the couch. “Most host extracurricular activities in their own hours.”

“How dedicated!”

“One tries as best they can to keep their students’ attention,” Anthony says, with something like a laugh. “Though it was Mr. Brown who sought me out himself, despite reading another subject entirely.”

“Oh?”

“A fan of my work,” Anthony explains.

“Yes,” Mrs. Brown says, and the light in her eyes is one that Matthew so often shows, though hardly now with his expression dimmed to damn near thunderous, at least to Anthony’s eyes. “He said you’re a poet, and he’s always buried himself deep in books.”

“You should read his poetry sometime,” Matthew offers. “Professor Dimmond regretfully is not a Catholic, but there is a faith of its own in his words.”

To this, Anthony does not engage. Whatever Matthew’s displeasure now is not his concern, should he so choose to sabotage himself by showing his mother Anthony’s torrid poetry. He is far more occupied in his attentions by the woman whose slender, hard-worked hand feels so heavy on his arm. Anthony turns towards her a little more.

“It’s so rare that I have the opportunity to meet the parents of my students,” Anthony says. “Tell me more of yourself, and how you’ve raised such a bright boy - and bright girls, as well.”

A bright boy who would do best to back down, Anthony adds in his own mind, and let Anthony lay smooth the path before them.

To his credit, Matt does back down. He finds his way around to one of the armchairs and slips into it, Beth on the arm of it beside him. When the twins return, giggling, they’re hushed and bidden to sit down and listen too. It becomes a little easier, then, for Matt to direct his attention to the twins, dragging one into his lap and loosening the bows in her hair to plait it again. 

Soon, they’re asking Anthony questions again, their curious minds and strange inquiries ease the pressure a little. When Beth bumps Matt’s elbow he gives her a smile and a gentle shake of his head, suggesting he will explain later should she ask again.

“Matthew, will you and Mr. Dimmond be staying for dinner?” His mother’s voice pulls Matt back to the now and he blinks at her, sheepish expression on his face suggesting he hadn’t been listening.

“Oh, please do stay!” Esther begs. “I’d so love to see how people from England eat.”

“Much as anyone else,” Anthony assures her, a warmth infusing his tone despite the flare-up earlier. Perhaps he should have told Matthew, but he’d hardly had the time, between sleeping off his wine and waking to Matthew pressed against him. It doesn’t matter now - Anthony feels a peculiar comfort amongst the Browns, an item of curiosity but a welcome one.

And then he glances to Matthew, and cannot help but notice the pull of muscles beneath his eyes.

“Perhaps another time,” Anthony says to Esther, before turning to Mrs. Brown. “If you’d have me, of course. I would loathe to be an imposition. Merely that I’m yet recovering from the journey - stomach’s a little unwell,” he adds, with a self-effacing laugh.

Mrs. Brown nods her understanding and hushes her youngest daughters who whine their displeasure. “You are welcome to our home any time, Mr. Dimmond, it would be a pleasure. Perhaps Matthew can escort you back to where you are staying? The city must be quite disorienting after such a long voyage by sea.”

“I would be very grateful, if he has the energy,” Anthony agrees, looking at his boy once more. Matt chews the inside of his lip a moment before smiling and pushing himself to stand. 

“I’ll be home for dinner,” he promises. “Perhaps after father gets home, but I will be here to spend the night.”

“Just find Mr. Dimmond safe back to his room,” his mother says, standing as well and allowing her hand to be taken by Anthony once more. “It was truly a pleasure.”

“Mine entirely,” he tells her, with another kiss touched above her knuckles. “Thank you for your hospitality, truly. I feel quite at home and it’s - it’s a welcome feeling. I look forward to meeting Mr. Brown in turn.”

“Certainly, professor.”

Anthony is grappled as he turns away, a twin on each side, and he laughs a little, giving them both pats on the head. Why not? He’s bloody exhausted, though not nearly so distressed as when he stood on the sidewalk torching through a cigarette. The anticipation and dread sapped him weaker than he accounted for, and for the moment - with an invitation to return - Anthony wants nothing more than to kiss Matthew until he relents in his glowering and to rest beside him for a little while.

“Miss Brown,” Anthony says as he detaches himself, extending a hand towards Beth. “Next time we shall discuss the finer nuances of Dante, I hope.”

Matthew’s sister gives him a look, lingering and curious, before taking his hand and inclining her head. “I would like that,” she admits. “I’ve never managed to parse through the more metaphor-heavy passages.”

Anthony kisses her hand as well, and turns to Matthew to wait for him to go ahead, directing the way home. When he passes, it is without a look to Anthony or to anyone else, and Matt holds the door open for Anthony just a moment before taking the handle to close it behind them both.

“I’ll find us a cab,” he murmurs.

“I’ll have a cigarette,” Anthony chirps, but the pleasant tilt to his voice - lilting a little higher again, no longer bearing the denseness that weighed it down before - falters a bit as Matthew stalks down the street to find a car for them.

Anthony has his cigarette anyway, and smoke fills the space between them when they ride in silence back to the hotel.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I know, I should have told you first, but there was hardly time between waking up and you under the sheets. I’d forgotten about it entirely until we were there. Rude surprise, really, finding out I’ve been secretly married,” he says, amused._
> 
> _“Certainly was for me,” Matt agrees, but he’s not laughing._

When they pull up at the hotel, Matt ignores the wallet handed him and pays out of his own, thanking the driver and getting out of the cab before Anthony can say anything. He’s in the lobby by the time his poet catches up, flicking his lighter against a cigarette that doesn’t seem to catch. When it finally does, Matt exhales loudly and gives his lover a sidelong look.

“Lead the way, Mr. Dimmond.”

“I thought I might have a word with the porter - ”

“Lead the way,” Matthew says again, flat, and Anthony rests a hand against his chest as if affronted, before he turns towards the elevator.

Neither say a word until they reach Anthony’s room, the door held open for Matthew to follow through. Anthony tosses his keys to the desk and groans as he stretches, arms folded behind his head. He twists one way, then the other, and with a sigh, lets his arms drop.

“Well, I think that went rather well.”

“You think so?” Matt asks him, finding an ashtray and stabbing the cigarette out into it. “You think it went well?”

“It could have been much worse.”

“Too bad your wife Molly wasn’t there to see it.”

Anthony laughs a little, turning towards the mirror to loosen his dreadful bow-tie. “I know,” he says as the silk hisses free from beneath his collar. “I know, I should have told you first, but there was hardly time between waking up and you under the sheets. I’d forgotten about it entirely until we were there. Rude surprise, really, finding out I’ve been secretly married,” he says, amused.

“Certainly was for me,” Matt agrees, but he’s not laughing. His tone doesn’t ease to softness as Anthony’s has. “Rude is one way to put it, Anthony.”

Anthony’s fingers still against the buttons of his jacket, a pause that lasts a beat longer than needed before moving to the next. He sheds his jacket and tosses it to the bed, turning to regard Matthew. He doesn’t find this funny. Anthony, in fact, can scarcely remember a time in which he’s seen such a dire look from the boy.

“Come now,” Anthony tuts, relieving himself of his waistcoat and stepping closer. He lifts his hands towards Matthew’s arms and freezes as Matt steps out of his reach. “Matthew. You do know I’m not _actually_ married, don’t you?”

“I do know that,” Matt agrees. “I know that but my mother doesn’t. My sister, who congratulated me just last night for making an honest man out of you, for having you treat me right and love me, doesn’t know.” Matt draws a hand through his hair and sets his hands on the windowsill. When he turns, he keeps them there, to stabilize himself and keep from fidgeting. “What did that win you, telling her that you’ve a wife? What possible good could that have done?”

Anthony’s mirth is throttled to stillness by this, uncertain how to respond to his student in his displeasure that is to Anthony’s mind untoward. “What better way to remove suspicion of me? Married, content, a curious old professor seeking adventure for a time, but with a home to which he’ll return. It’s what’s expected, Matthew. It’s what’s acceptable. So I don’t actually have a wife, but how is she any worse off for thinking that I do?”

“Because she will actually go to pray for her, Anthony.” Matt’s voice pulls louder than he expects and he ducks his head to gather himself before he continues. “Because she will go to church and say your name, and hers, and pray to God that you be protected and watched over, because that is what she does. She will go to church and pray for you two to have a child, because you’ve told her you’ve been struggling to. She will go to church and she will spend her night in prayer for people you made up.”

Matt draws a hand over his lips, then brings both up to rub up over his face and into his hair again with a long sigh. “You would have not been suspect had you not mentioned a spouse at all, it isn’t in their nature to pry for information. My family, my mother, they take things at face value, they believe because they have faith in the good of people.”

Anthony blinks, briefly taken aback by this. “Why on earth would anyone spend time praying for someone they’ve never met?”

“Because - because they’re good people,” Matthew exclaims. “Because she met you and you told her a story that you knew - you _knew_ \- would move her. Because I told them you’ve been good to me at Cambridge and they’re grateful. Because not everyone lies, Anthony, about everything, and just because you think religion’s a joke doesn’t mean that everyone else does.”

“Dear boy,” Anthony says, coming closer to reach for him, but when Matthew tenses in warning, Anthony merely lets his hands remain lifted. His throat jerks in a swallow, gaze twitching narrow at the rough rebuke. “So she prays. So she feels as if she’s accomplished something. And there’s no question of why I’m here, and we draw no suspicion for spending time together. No one loses in this. It’s harmless.”

Matthew’s eyes widen as he shakes his head, for a moment stunned speechless. “You are so fucking selfish,” he finally whispers, and Anthony’s laugh cuts him off curt.

“Am I,” he says. “Am I truly, for coming to another country for you, and finding a means for us to spend time together here.”

“Yes,” answers Matthew, stepping closer with such intensity that it is Anthony, then who steps back. “Because you’ve shown me today that you don’t care about them. You want me to yourself, and you don’t care whose time or energy or emotion you waste. Are you so unclever - no,” he says, a finger uplifted when Anthony parts his lips to retort. “No. Are you truly so unclever, Anthony Dimmond, that you are brought to bald-faced lies rather than simply guarding your tongue for one afternoon?”

“Better they think me an old fairy then,” he suggests. “Better they think that my being here is suspect and perverse, the professor leering after his handsome young student -”

“You think that,” Matthew says, his voice hardly above a whisper now. “You think that, and it’s why you’re so goddamn afraid of anyone else seeing you in the same way that you see yourself.”

“Stop cursing,” Anthony echoes him, from earlier that morning but with a sinuous hiss to his words. It’s a low blow, and a cruel one, but with his hands upraised and forced a single significant step back, Anthony’s bitterness unfurls.

“Does Hannibal see you that way? Does Will?”

“They’ve nothing to do with this.”

“They’re people you have been honest with,” Matt says, stepping nearer, and Anthony, now, the one to step back and turn away. “They’re the people you trust to see you for who you are, and they do not see you as you fear my mother will, or my sisters or my friends.”

Anthony seeks for his cigarettes again, from the pocket of his coat.

“Not everyone’s mother is as cruel as yours,” Matthew tells him.

Anthony’s movements still, and unseen to Matthew, he nearly snaps his cigarette between his fingers. He is not given to violence, in his nature. His methods of destruction do not often emerge as overt violence. But in that instant, Anthony wants nothing more than to put his fist through the mirror at his side and watch blood run between his knuckles.

He presses his cigarette between his lips, and says nothing until it is lit.

“You should go,” he says, his tone flat. “You’re due for dinner.”

“Then I’ll be late.”

“You should go,” Anthony says again, slower and firmer, like the flexing of fingers into a white-knuckled grip. “I have no desire to hear you gloat about how happy was your upbringing, and how miserable my own. We are all but products of our environment, are we not? And we can no more change the soil from which we grew, be it wholesome or poisoned, than we can change the blooms that it produced.”

“I’ve nothing to gloat over,” Matthew tells him, stepping nearer. “Nor do I want you to change. Hell, Anthony, if I did I would not love you so as you are. And you _know_ I love you, despite how your stubbornness will now push against your gut to make you believe I do not, you know I do.”

“Then what the hell do you want?” Anthony spits, cigarette still between his lips, trembling as they do until he takes it from them, and realizes his hands are trembling more.

“I want the man I love to be as much himself as he can be, with the family that loves me,” Matt tells him softly. “I don’t want you to hide behind stories no one needs to hear, you needn’t. Not for me or for them. And not from them.” Matt doesn’t reach for Anthony either, but he can see him just behind his shoulder in the reflection at his side. “Of course you needn’t tell them the truth, I doubt I ever will. My anger is hardly with what you told but with the fact that you told it.”

Anthony’s throat clicks with a rough swallow, his gaze focused in the middle-distance, and spite burning like bile inside him. It is a savage thing that was born inside him long ago, that altogether too often Anthony has let himself believe to be gone. His pride restrains apology, binding it as tightly as his ribs now seem to squeeze against his lungs, and he shakes his head.

He knew it would come to this. He knew that he would lay to ruin the carefully placed bricks they’ve set together. And part of him, that horrid part of him that claws ugliness into his throat, wishes Matthew would go and bring about the end that Anthony has spent sleepless nights anticipating as inevitable.

“It means nothing now,” he finally says, once he’s charred his throat with smoke sucked too quickly and held too deep. “But I thought -”

“Tell me.”

“I thought of her,” he says, a mirthless smile bending his lips. “My mother. I thought of her and how I saw burnt before me the home that I had known. And so I endeavored, then, knowing that calamity will always come in my wake, to not make the same mistake with your family. Let them think me ordinary. Let them think me married and normal. Let them excuse away the wrong way I bend my wrist and all of it. I thought I would relent to this, for them, as I could not with my own family, and that it would protect you from me.”

Matthew watches him a moment more before breaking that silent wall between them and setting his hand against Anthony's shoulder, his forehead against his spine.

“I feel safest with you,” Matt tells him. “I haven't ever felt so safe as when I am with you. I had hoped I could offer you that haven with me. I always will, regardless of anything. She cannot touch you here, and mine will not. I love you.”

Even these words, as gentle as they are in intent, twist inside Anthony. He wants to loosen the stays that snare him, if it means reaching into his chest and snapping loose every bloody rib to free them. He wants to breathe again, and speak without wretchedness, and to feel Matthew’s laughter as it presses warmth into a body too long cooled with abandonment.

But he hasn’t been, this time. Even in Anthony’s error, in his - yes - selfishness, Matthew is here. He is here missing supper with the family he left to find Anthony a world away, because Anthony has let his past taint every single thing that has come after.

“Christ,” Anthony whispers, with a muttered apology that follows just after for his swearing. He lifts his fingers to his eyes and presses them there until he sees spots, relenting only then and letting his hand drop away. The past tense of Matthew’s words - he _hoped_ \- lingers like discordant notes of a harpsichord tuned all wrong.

“I don’t know how to fix this,” Anthony says, after a moment more of forcing himself to feel the strife he’s caused. He licks his lips apart and furrowing his brow, shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”

Matthew nuzzles between his shoulders and gently wraps his arms around his middle to hold Anthony near. His apology is enough to ease the tightness of his chest and help him breathe. His understanding loosens the tendrils of anger that trapped Matt in their bitterness.

Anthony is enough. 

He always has been.

“You needn't,” Matthew whispers. “You've done no harm or wrong. We needn't visit them often, and when we do, to them you will be married to Molly,” Matt snorts. “It isn't half as much a lie as it could have been.”

Anthony’s laugh is rough, scraping loose despite the grasping claws inside him that try to rend it back into place. He ducks his head - relenting in posture, relenting in pride - and pulls his lips between his teeth before slowly letting them unfurl.

“Could’ve said I had children,” he offers, and the sound, the heat, the movement of Matthew’s wry laugh against his back nearly brings Anthony to his knees.

He could spend a lifetime trying to describe what Matthew’s love means to him.

He will, he knows, do exactly that, eternally unworthy and endlessly in awe, forever seeking the accurate alchemy of words that could express even a fraction of his gratitude.

“I like them,” Anthony admits, his words falling faulty now in an honesty wrenched away from the void in which he buries it, beneath jokes and disregard, bitterness and blitheness. “Truly. Even our imaginary Molly aside, I felt welcomed. Comfortable. I could see, in the space itself and in all of them, the earth that grew you.”

He licks his lower lip into his mouth and lets it loose with a soft smile.

“It’s beautiful, Matthew.”

Another squeeze to Anthony's middle before Matt turns him, taking his cigarette from him to set aside. When he kisses him, it is a forgiveness and a reminder. _I am here, I am here with you, I love you and I chose you._

Matt wraps his arms around Anthony's shoulders and nuzzles him, humming warmly when his poet parts his lips again, just to breathe him in.

“Do you want to know a secret?” He whispers.

“Always,” Anthony smiles, tugging Matthew closer.

“I am so proud of you,” Matt tells him.

Anthony snorts, but he loops his arms around Matthew’s waist and rests his cheek against his hair. “That I only caused a significant amount of distress instead of an insurmountable degree of it? Bully for me.”

Matt laughs, softly. “You were the best behaved I’ve ever seen you.”

“Oh dear.”

“But it’s more than that. I’m proud of _you_. The things you’ve done, Anthony, the person you are,” he says, as they shake the tension loose from between them in careful touches and soft words. “I wish you could see yourself the way that I do.”

Anthony does not dismiss his words, with some smart remark perched on his tongue about love making one blind. He accepts them, or at least the spirit of them, as they are offered. Perhaps this is a faith of its own, to trust what Anthony cannot see, and believe that Matthew can, and makes it manifest in his own good intentions.

“I’m sorry,” Anthony says again, more clear-headed now than before, but just as earnest. “I’m sorry for disappointing you today.”

Matt kisses him and holds, humming warm. “Do you remember when I first met Hannibal?” He asks, watching Anthony blink in gentle confusion. “I was terrified. I could never live up to someone like that. If you loved someone so…” Matt laughs. “Someone like him, how could you love me?”

“Sweet, silly boy.” Anthony's hand settles to warm curls.

“But you proved to me that I was worth the love you offered. You showed me I was. And slowly I grew to believe it. I have faith that you will, too.” Matthew pushes to his toes and noses against him. “I forgive you, though there is little to forgive. And I love you, always.”

Anthony grasps him close, with a hand in his hair and an arm around his middle, bringing his student against his chest. He clasps their lips together, a warm kiss that does not push or twist or demand, but merely accepts - as one might any holy sacrament - the promise that Matthew makes to him. It is a relief to know that despite Anthony’s best endeavors, deliberate and accidental, to hasten what once seemed like an inevitable end for them, Matthew’s stubbornness far exceeds Anthony’s talent for destruction.

“How lucky I am that you do,” Anthony murmurs, touching a softer kiss before letting his hands slip reluctantly free. “And you will be late for supper, Mr. Brown, if you let my foolishness delay you any longer. Tell them I lost my senses and got turned around, and you had to set me back upon the right path.”

“I certainly shall,” Matt murmurs, making no move to hurry out. “And I will tell them I needed to walk my city again. They will understand.”

Anthony’s brow goes up in soft curiosity. “And will you walk the city?”

Matt smiles wider and shakes his head, pushing closer to Anthony and tugging his hair to bend his face closer to Matt’s own again. He won’t walk the city, not yet. He won’t go home, not yet. He will hold his lover and remind him that he loves him. He will feel Anthony’s heart beat against his own and have his match.

He will stay, for as long as he can, because he wants to.

“Maybe later,” he whispers. “Maybe later, with you, but not now.”

“I feel guilty for keeping you,” Anthony murmurs, though he does not resist as Matthew turns his poet’s back towards the bed.

“I’m here because I want to be. I have weeks with them still.”

Anthony makes a sound of misgiving, as Matthew takes a step forward, and Anthony by their nearness has to take a step back. “I feel selfish for needing so much of you.”

“Everything I give you is because it pleases me to do so.”

Another step finds the edge of the bed at the backs of Anthony’s knees, and he sits with his hands against Matthew’s hips and his legs spread around him. He holds a reverent kiss against Matt’s belly and sighs, nuzzling close.

“Well,” he finally says, once his heart has eased and his pulse quickened for reasons other than his own anxiety. “For the next several days I plan to undertake expeditions, to local points of notable history. It will be an arduous undertaking, battlefields and secret bars alike. I am afraid I must prohibit you from joining me, and instead remain in the sanctuary of the Brown Estate.”

Matthew laughs, fingers fisted warmly in Anthony’s hair. He keeps him close but looks down at him, at the mischievous sparkle in his poet’s eye, and how much softer his expression now than it has been all day. With a tug, Matthew bends him back, brings their mouths together, and slowly they clamber up onto the bed.

“Then we will make the most of tonight,” Matthew promises, “and learn each other again on your return.”


End file.
